Mrs Accident is at home

Sometimes an at-home day comes at exactly the right time.

I know we are due for one when I start to feel overwhelmed by the clutter on the kitchen table, the floor is pretending to belong to a mud hut, and we are scraping the bottom of both the biscuit barrel and my patience.

Not my house
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Then it's time for a reset. A morning to clean and clear the house and bake, an afternoon to sit quietly with a well earned cup of tea and a fresh, warm biscuit.

Peanut is feeling off colour today. She had a fabulous day yesterday with swimming lessons in the morning then a long play at an adventure playground. (She can do the swinging chain bridge and the flying fox by herself now! Today the swing bridge, tomorrow uni... she's growing up so damn fast.)

But today Peanut woke up cross, picked at her breakfast, and then retired to the couch with a book on tigers. She didn't want her favourite snack, she didn't want to watch tv, and eventually, three hours early, she decided that she should probably take her feverish head back to bed for a nap. Poor kid.

(For the record, Bug seems totally fine. She spent all morning pretending to be a pirate on the dog couch, with Archie as her loyal and sleepy sidekick. He may have known where the treasure was, but he certainly wasn't telling.)

So, without the girls underfoot I have been a cleaning whirlwind. The floors are back to shiny; the clutter banished; the courtyard is swept; and the pot plants, previously considering turning into cactii due to neglect, have been watered. And I won't even begin to gloat about the laundry. Suffice to say it has been well and truly beaten into submission. Of course, I outsourced the beating to the washing machine, for I am a thoroughly modern woman.

I didn't feel modern yesterday, though. Yesterday my neighbour turned up at my door with a bucket of pears that she had just picked. She tipped them into my held-out apron skirt, and in return I gave her six fresh eggs from the Accidental hens. Which she carried home in her apron. A regular 1950's street, we are.

In other news, our bath toys have been secretly breeding. They multiply overnight, then perch around the rim of the tub like lepers at Lourdes, slopping in their own damp puddles. We have many bath toy holders from bath toy sets, but they are all specifically designed to hold exactly two fewer toys than they came with. Frustrating.

But mix an old mandarin bag with a scrap of ugly orange bias and voila: solution.

I should have washed the bias first, though. It came from my grandmother's stash and probably originated sometime before sliced bread. The first time it was wet, orange dye ran into the bath and made the water look like someone had had a not-so-little accident. I jokingly blamed Peanut and she blamed me right back... and I wasn't even in the bath. What did she think I had done? Thankfully the dye is easy to rinse off, so no harm done.

Finally, in this meandering post about nothing in particular, it's time to award comment of the week. 

And our winner?  Sarah from Stitching and Needling. Check out the sidebar to see what made me chuckle. And a big thank you to everyone who comments. I blog for comments, (they are cheaper than peanuts) and get excited every single time I get a new one... so feel free to leave another today!